What I'm writing at the moment is taking so much energy/attention for just "one book" that I can't even imagine writing a "trilogy". LOL. I think it would take me 5 years & lots of vitamin pills and trips to the doctor to turn my current narrative into a "series". If you can pull off an interesting series, my hat's off to you! Who knows, your series might become the next "Hunger Games" or "Twilight". =)
Im writing my first book, but the story/world I have means that if I wanted to I could continue with it into more books. I spent a long time developing the plot/twists and the like and it meant I ended up with something a lot bigger than one book could handle...unless it was a mammoth book! Anyway, I need to try and get the first book completed before thinking further along and think this book will take a while
I don't have a preference either way as the quality of the tale and the impact it can have on the reader is what is important to me. My mind is simple. It can only focus on one thing at a time, so one story at a time, but why I started writing is probably much different than everyone else. I don't "love" to write. My preferences are towards visual representations of stories as my mind is more visually oriented. I love movies and I also enjoy several animated series. I wish I could say I enjoy live action series, but there are few that can get me to connect to them on the level that I thoroughly enjoy. I enjoy MMORPGs as well and I find most of their stories, or the delivery, to be exceedingly bad. I am not a programmer, nor an artist, so it squashed my dreams of working in game design, which leaves me with writing. To the point: My original concept was going to be one for an animated series. It was aimed at being more adult oriented and realistic than what some animated series aim for. It would be more in line with Ghost in the Shell than Bleach or Naruto. There would be brief nudity, violence, drug use, and adult language. I have plot developed from an alternate history 1940s-1990s currently. It involves three generations of multiple families where the show would have stories/flashbacks of earlier times, but the primary plot would have to be from the late 1970s-1990s. Through extensive research I came to the conclusion that it was entirely unrealistic for me to attempt pitching an animated series with no background in either TV or authorship. What was I to do? Abandon it all? I couldn't get it out of my head so I have been writing bits and pieces off and on for a few years now in typical book format, mostly without any great amount of specific detail outside of character movement. Things have changed extensively, but the length of the history, and thus the story, remains. I am unsure of how many definitive "book endings" would actually be able to occur without the reader wanting to know more, thus not being a standalone book. My current theory is to write the entirety of the 1970s-1990s to get the story put together and on paper even if it is terrible writing/lacking detail for portions of it. Then, I would write the preceding portions of the story with hopes of finding a way to best put it all together. The experience of writing the later years would hopefully improve my writing for when I work on the earlier years so that I could write everything in it's final form in the proper chronological order, primarily for quality sake, but also for potential "series" sake. Options that I can think of real quick before I head out: 1) A standalone of the early years, if it gets picked up and sells, potential to have the later years be sequential novels. 2) Write several novellas/short books that breaks up the entirety into small segments, a series or just books that share a timeline/some characters. 3) Write one giant story. 4) Force myself to pick one specific portion of the entirety and force all I wanted from the story into one book. 5) Give up? Giving up is hard to do as the story would still remain, eating at my mind, unless replaced with something else. Caldenfor
I personally have no preference concerning series or stand alone novels. As long as the story initially grabs me, I'll read it until the end, whether that's one book or several. I can understand the idea of a particularly large series being daunting though. I tried to read Ericson's Malazon Book of the Fallen, but the writing just didn't cut it for me. I could read the first book and enjoy it well enough, but it never compelled me to buy book two, let alone book ten. To be honest, I think the reason why so many people seem obsessed with writing a series is that so many people are unsure about what they're writing. Alright, that might sound condescending, but the idea has already been touched on here. For the inexperienced writer (like myself anyways), when you decide to 'write a story', you start with what's immediately available as a springboard. It's often Harry Potter and the like that you hear so much about, and so you start with a fantasy, in serial form, because that's what's around you. These are what probably inspired a lot of young writers to write, so why not write something similar? This isn't always the thought process, but I'm willing to guess this has gone through at least some of our minds. That's not to say that all people who write series write them for the sake of writing a series. Doing so, as others have said, probably isn't the best idea. But perhaps your tale overreaches the word limit of a single novel and requires you to break it up into more digestible parts? I think that must happen to people a good amount of the time. Personally I have no grasp of word count, and works that I think will be around 90k words easily end up being much more. I can empathize with the writer whose work turns into a trilogy just because his tale is simply too big.
This might just be true as well. And I think many beginning writers have no idea about how much writing-space their ideas will take up. They are all "I have so many ideas, I have to make it a series/trilogy" but if they would write it all out and cut the unnecessary stuff in the end they might just end up with the word count of one novel-size story. It's difficult to translate the amount of ideas into amount of words before even starting.
Very true and this is where I feel my story is too big for one book, but as I write I may find its not the case and fits neatly into a novel sized book....only time will tell.
I don't think writing a series or trilogy is necessarily a bad thing. The reason why I'm personally interested in it is because I don't know if I can stay interested in a group of characters for an extended period of time. I have an idea that's series-esque. The difference is that rather than sticking with the same group of characters, I'm sticking with the same setting and world. It's a different kind of series, I suppose. It's a totally different plot and theme each book with totally different characters but it follows the same theme and setting of the "series" itself. Really, though, if a writer thinks they can stay connected and passionate about their characters and not get overwhelmed with planning a plot that spans out several books, I don't see why not. In fact, I think it's great that they can do such a thing.
I'd rather just write a good book - if I like my characters sometimes I'll leave it opened ended for the possibility of a sequel but other than that I don't intensionally seek out to do a series. And for me a series is pure calculation, you have to know where you're going, and especially how you'll get there , with enough hiccups to extend the story up to four books - And since I'm never sure how my story is going to end that's out for me. I also think there's too much presumption with a series - you're presuming your story needs 3 books to cover everything , you're presuming you audience wants to invest $60 ( The Hunger Games books set - not on sale ) on your effort, you're presuming you'll be the next big thing. It's not that I'm against series - I loved James a Moore's Serenity Falls series - but sometimes I'm not in the mood to investe my time waiting for a open-ended story to wrap up.
I think the risk is, as I think Cogito has pointed out several times, that you've decided your story is going to span over three books, and if you realize it won't take that many books to tell it you might be tempted to add a lot of unnecessary filler to make it cover three books instead of one or two. I understand now that it''s the reason for why you should not start with the intention to write a series. Just write it and check for yourself how much it is. If you end up with a 300+word story you might consider rewriting parts of it to make it three stories with their own individual goals and endings, but that should be something you consider after you've finished writing it.
I don't have a problem with a series as long as each individual book tells a unique and mostly complete story. I recently bought a book (not sure if I should say the title) that only mentions being book one of a series in small print. The story drags on and on just to introduce the characters and by the end nothing has been solved, because they're expecting me to go out and buy the second one. If the first book told it's own story that was then going to be built upon I might have considered it, but instead I sort of felt that I'd been tricked. I used to be interested in writing series when I was younger, but in hindsight that's only because I wasn't willing to commit to a story. I was too in love with the characters and wanted to always have the option to write more about them. I thought they were super interesting (they weren't) and assumed other people would feel the same (they wouldn't). I can't say that everyone who writes a trilogy is self-indulgent, but I definitely was.
I am not working on a series. I feel (wrongly) that series are more "commercial" than their stand-alone counterpart. I also have the same preference when it comes to reading (I've no clue where this bias comes from). I respect every person that is passionate about writing and is committed to do so. I also like diversity! I am glad that, while I'm working on my project, others are working on different ones.
For me, it isn't the idea of writing as a character for one book that got me into writing. A song of ice and fire got into writing, so I was immediately into writing an epic 1000 page fantasy novel. I realized I wasn't close enough to being good enough so I backed off and read some YA books so I could learn that trade. I read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and once again, I was inspired to write YA series. I know I should write a stand alone and I probably have to, to get published, but writing a successful series is my dream. My goal comes first though, and my goal is to get published, so one step at a time I suppose.
I haven't really written anything that could be part of a series, no. Frankly I'm not sure I'd have the patience for that. Series can work - it just depends on the writing, and the ability to make each part be interesting on its own.